Sharepoint and Master Documents are collaboration tools that don’t… well… collaborate.
And people at Redmond wonder why customers get frustrated with their products …
Sharepoint is a collaboration tool that is getting better. The latest versions don’t have the limitations and narrow view of the first efforts and it is a great way to share information and documents among a group of people.
Another tool that has improved enormously over the years is Master Documents in Word. Even the mention of this feature can make long-time Word users curl up in a ball and cry. The idea was that you had a Master Document that linked to separate sub-documents to make one continuous document with consistent formatting, pagination, table of contents etc (like chapters coming together to make a complete book). In practice Master Documents was, for some time, a great way to crash and lose data in more than one file at once. Recent versions of Word have a working version of MD’s once it was totally re-written and Microsoft staff forced to use it themselves. To this day we still get enquiries from readers who want to know of Master Documents is ‘safe’ – one bitten, twice shy.
Anyway it would seem obvious to create a Master Document to bring together a team project. You have separate chapters / documents saved in Sharepoint then combine them using Master Documents to create the final report.
Think again …
If you try to use these two Microsoft features together you may get, if you’re lucky a message “You cannot save while the file is in use by another process. Try saving the file with a new name.” If you’re unlucky whole sub-documents could be deleted!
Go searching for a solution and you’ll discover that “the master document feature in Word was not designed to work with documents on a SharePoint server, including SharePoint sites that use the Document Workspace feature.”
That’s right – these two good collaboration features don’t, well, collaborate. Chances are the two development teams didn’t collaborate properly with each other.
This latest example of the Microsoft advantage is documented here.
